Seminar 17.1.2020: Effect of the city’s intervention on online public engagement: A case study of participatory budgeting using stochastic actor-oriented models

Despite the burgeoning literature on online deliberation, few studies have empirically examined the effectiveness of policy design and behavior intervention. Most previous studies tend to focus on new technology and evaluate the quality of deliberation and opinion change based on interviews, surveys, and experiments. However, the author argues that the role of governments is still crucial regardless of technology, and attention needs to be paid to research how citizens actually engage in online deliberative settings. Against the backdrop, the author will present preliminary results of a case study that aims to analyze the effect of interventions on online engagement. The analysis selected a case of Omastadi, a pilot participatory budgeting project initiated by the City of Helsinki that used a digital platform in which citizens proposed and developed ideas into feasible plans in collaboration with citizens and experts. The raw data were collected by parsing the web pages of all proposals and plans, then reconstructed into longitudinal network data. The relationship between interventions and significant change of engagement will be analyzed through stochastic actor-oriented models.

Time: 17.1.2020 at 13:15-14:45, Metsätalo (Unioninkatu 40) Sali 29

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Obituary, Anne Haila

Anne Haila ( 1953  – 2019), ‘the most important Georgist in the World’, dies at 66.

Credit: Veikko Somerpuro / University of Helsinki

She loved to read, reflect, and recount what she had read. Research had to be dialectical or it was mediocre. She was a warrior for Southern Knowledge, but not all versions of it. Although she was on top of the state-of-the-art in the social sciences and the expansive breadth of research approaches in the social sciences, for her, no social science enquiry was complete without a serious engagement with land – not just as a thing, but its rent. No, she was not a physiocrat, even if she was fond of the Agricultural University of Norway where she worked from 1997 to 1998. Her focus was cities. Indeed, as one of only a few Academy Professors in Finland, a Finnish way of saying ‘Distinguished Professor’, or the crème de la crème of the Finnish professoriate, she was more a disciple of Henry George and Sun Yat-sen than she was of Francois Quesnay, Charles Richard de Butre, or any of the French physiocrats. In Finland, she attributed the influences on her to Pekka V. Virtanen who assured her of the uniqueness of land and to Lauri af Heurlin ‘who released the issue of land rent from the academic curfew imposed upon it’.

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